TILT Story today announced that Joel Cessna, a healthcare marketing executive with more than two decades of experience building commercial organizations, has joined the company as Chief Growth Officer. The newly created role reports to CEO Joanne Thornton, and Cessna starts on November 2.
Cessna will lead growth strategy across the full TILT Story platform, which brought together TILT Story’s brand strategy, creative and content capabilities with LionShare’s healthcare CRM and marketing automation in September. He will focus on helping health systems and healthcare brands get more from the platform’s connected capabilities, deepening existing client partnerships, and building a client development team that can scale alongside client needs.
The appointment comes as health systems and healthcare brands look for marketing partners who can connect brand, data and performance.
“Health system marketers are telling us they want fewer partners who can do more, and Joel has spent his career listening to what those leaders need and connecting them to the right solutions. He knows the senior marketers we serve, he understands what health systems need from a partner right now, and he already knows LionShare from the inside. Bringing him on full time is a big step in building TILT Story into the partner our clients have been asking for,” said Joanne Thornton, CEO of TILT Story.
Cessna has spent his career building sales and business development functions inside fast-growing healthcare marketing companies. As Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Medicom Health, and later as Vice President of Sales at Eruptr, which provides digital marketing to hospitals and health systems, he built scalable sales teams, standardized sales processes and established the commercial disciplines behind significant growth. After Eruptr combined with DECODE to form Unlock Health in 2023, he continued as Vice President of Sales, helping carry out the larger company’s growth strategy.
Most recently, Cessna built LionShare’s business development infrastructure in a fractional role while advising several noncompeting healthcare organizations. That work gives him a firsthand view of how commercial teams scale across very different business models, and a head start on bringing LionShare and TILT Story’s capabilities to market together.
“TILT Story has put together something the healthcare marketing industry doesn’t have enough of: real creative and brand strength sitting alongside the CRM, data and automation that prove results,” said Cessna. “Health system marketers are being asked to show measurable impact with leaner teams, and they want partners who can do more than one thing well. I’ve spent close to 20 years working alongside these leaders, and I’m excited to help them get more from a single, connected team.”
Cessna holds a bachelor’s degree in management from The College of St. Scholastica and master’s degrees in management and project management from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.
